SPECIFIC LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT IN ITALIAN AND ENGLISH - EVALUATING ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNTS OF GRAMMATICAL DEFICITS

Two groups of children with specific language impairment-a group acqui ring Italian as their first language and a group acquiring English-wer e compared in terms of their use of grammatical morphology. Comparison s revolved around the differential predictions of three alternative ac counts of grammatical deficits in children with specific language impa irment. The Italian-speaking children made greater use of noun inflect ions, verb inflections and copula forms than their English-speaking co unterparts matched according to mean length of utterance in words. Art icles were used to a similar degree. The pattern of findings was most consistent with processing accounts, one based on morphological richne ss, the other on durational properties of grammatical morphology. Howe ver, both of these accounts require an additional provision or qualifi cation to handle the data satisfactorily.